Marks & Spencer Case Study
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Global retailer streamlines distribution of POS data
using the Microsoft® BizTalk™ Framework and
BizTalk Server 2000
Published: 4/4/2000
Using the Microsoft BizTalk Framework and BizTalk Server
2000, global retailer Marks & Spencer upgraded its IT
infrastructure to rapidly deliver POS information to various
corporate data-center applications and accelerate response
time to emerging market trends. With revenues of $13.2
billion, Marks & Spencer is one of the United Kingdom's
premier clothing, food, and financial services retailers.
Background
International retailer Marks & Spencer, with revenues
of $13.2 billion, is one of the United Kingdom's premier
clothing, food, and financial services retailers. Marks &
Spencer has more than 600 retail and franchise operations
stores in Central Europe, North America, and Asia, 500 of
which are owned by the company. The retailer's commitment to
value, quality, and service began nearly 120 years ago; Marks
& Spencer is legendary in the retail industry for its
supplier relationships and long-term thinking.
Marks & Spencer selected Extensible Markup Language
(XML), the Microsoft BizTalk Framework, and Microsoft BizTalk
Server 2000 to upgrade its information technology (IT)
infrastructure. The goal: to ensure that point-of-sale (POS)
data comes back to the data center in near real time and then
can be passed to Marks & Spencer's or the supplier's
operational systems. By rapidly identifying emerging sales
trends, the company can make faster and better business
decisions surrounding the management of promotions, control of
inventory, and direction of the production of suppliers.
Business Challenge
Global retailing is in a period of intense competition, and
Marks & Spencer needed to refocus and rethink its plans in
order to respond. To support the business and drive it
forward, Marks & Spencer had to maximize the availability
of information across its various operational systems.
Customer relationships, service, and innovation are vital to
the retailer's success and are fueled by faster access to
better information. The information flow needed to be near
real time to allow rapid response to changing retail market
demands.
"We saw our infrastructure redesign project, EPoS
(Electronic Point of Sale), as an opportunity to leverage our
uniquely strong integration with suppliers to create a
dynamic, event-driven, global supply chain," says Mike
Yorwerth, Project Manager at Marks & Spencer. "By having
real-time access to sales and inventory information, we wanted
to be able to place orders with our suppliers more rapidly so
we can respond swiftly and efficiently to customer needs. For
example, if we see that there is a sudden high demand for a
specific product, we want to let our suppliers know as soon as
possible so that they can ship new merchandise before we run
out. This directly translates to improving the quality of
customer service, which is the foundation of our business."
To hone this competitive advantage, Marks & Spencer
wanted to deploy a solution that could support huge business
and operational changes in the future, as well as make it
possible to move data anywhere within the company's worldwide
operations or supplier base. The requirement to integrate with
each of its supplier's business processes, which are hosted on
a variety of operating systems and platforms, added complexity
to the project. Interoperability with these different
environments required a technology that was broadly available,
based on industry standards, and provided the flexibility and
enterprise-class performance demanded by this solution.
Solution
Marks & Spencer reviewed a number of technology options
in detail and decided the best solution to integrate data from
its stores with its various back-end systems was the Microsoft
BizTalk Framework and Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000. The
solution aims to move transaction-level POS data from the
retail stores to the head-office data center in near real
time. This will allow for the effective use of POS data,
making it possible to monitor and respond to emerging market
needs much more rapidly. In addition, the upgraded
infrastructure will allow for the integration of business
processes with more than 500 suppliers, using BizTalk business
documents. This will support the development of a dynamic,
event-based supply chain able to respond in near real time.
Marks & Spencer installed a single Microsoft Windows
NT®-based server in each store, with POS terminals running the
Windows NT Workstation operating system. Each transaction
flows to the back-end server, which batches the transactions
every minute, converts them to XML messages using simple XML
tools, and sends the data to the corporate systems using the
Microsoft Message Queue Services (MSMQ) in Windows NT Server.
At the corporate data center, a load-balanced array of servers
running Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000 on the Windows® 2000
operating system receives these transmissions-and
intelligently routes the right transaction information in the
right format over the right transport to the right application
where the data is integrated with the local business
processes.
For example, for processing Marks & Spencer credit-card
transactions, the existing infrastructure historically has
relied on a custom-written CICS application running on IBM
System 390 and supported by a DB2 database. When redesigning
the EPoS system, Marks & Spencer developers wanted to take
advantage of their existing CICS application rather than write
a new application to handle the credit-card processing. To
seamlessly integrate the existing CICS application with the
new Windows 2000-based EPoS system, Marks & Spencer
leveraged the capabilities of XML and BizTalk Server 2000.
BizTalk Server was easily configured to identify all Marks
& Spencer credit-card transactions based on the contents
of specific fields in the incoming XML messages. BizTalk
Server then transforms the credit-card transactions and
forwards them to the CICS application using COM Transaction
Integrator (COMTI) technology, an integrated part of Microsoft
SNA Server.
Marks & Spencer also uses BizTalk Server 2000 to
integrate the EPoS system with the MQSeries-based applications
that are hosted on the IBM mainframe. Again, BizTalk Server
was configured to identify a specific class of transaction
that requires the support of the MQSeries application by
examining the content of specific fields in the document. Once
a document is identified, BizTalk Server transforms the
document and forwards it to the Microsoft MSMQ/MQSeries
bridge, which sends the transformed document to the IBM
MQSeries application on the mainframe. The MSMQ/MQSeries
bridge also is an integrated part of the Microsoft SNA Server.
Lastly, the EPoS system uses BizTalk Server 2000 to
transform all XML documents and send them over MSMQ to a
Windows 2000-based application. The XML data then is fed into
Microsoft SQL Server™, automatically rolled up into data
cubes, and analyzed using the integrated online analytical
processing (OLAP) technology that is included with SQL Server
version 7.0.
"By using XML and the Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000 as the
point of integration with our IBM mainframe, we were able to
maintain our existing investment in our CICS and MQSeries
applications," says Yorwerth. "We are impressed with
Microsoft's ability to fit into such a heterogeneous IT
environment."
Some of the applications run remotely in a supplier data
center, while others are local to Marks & Spencer's data
center. This architecture can support up to 250 store
transactions per second, easily handling up to 5 GB of traffic
on a peak day.
As a result, detailed information is flowing in near real
time from the POS to the back-end systems that support the
stores. Marks & Spencer now can recognize emerging market
changes, analyze trends, and ultimately make and implement
business decisions that affect change in the stores far more
quickly than before. This results in reduced costs and an
increase in customer service.
Why Marks & Spencer Chose
Microsoft
"We selected the Microsoft BizTalk Framework and Microsoft
BizTalk Server 2000 as the core technologies for our corporate
backbone because we recognized the great interoperability and
integration capabilities they had to offer," says Yorwerth.
"The flexibility to interchange data within Marks &
Spencer and with our working partners, without having to
redesign our applications, saved us tons of money and provides
us with a tremendous competitive advantage thanks to BizTalk.
"Our business is committed to leveraging and exploiting the
best of Microsoft technologies, for doing so reduces our
R&D cost and time to roll out new services," Yorwerth
adds. "Clearly, Microsoft is behind XML with its BizTalk
technologies and is incorporating XML into all of its
products. By making BizTalk a foundation of our architecture,
we know that we are correctly positioned to benefit from
future technologies Microsoft develops."
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services,
call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400.
In Canada, call the Microsoft Resource Centre at (800)
563-9048. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please
contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information
on the World Wide Web, go to: http://www.microsoft.com/
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